'Uninvited' Panel: Muslim Brotherhood a Threat to America

The nonviolent “influence” and intelligence operations of the Muslim Brotherhood are as much a threat to America as Al Qaeda or other violent terrorist organizations, a panel of experts assembled at the Breitbart News Network, Center for Security Policy and EMPAct America “The Uninvited II: The National Security Action Summit” warned.

“America is at risk,” former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, once the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said, appearing at the panel via video. “We face external threats that are very, very significant.”

Hoekstra quoted Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as being aware of threats of radical Islam. “There is broad bipartisan agreement that America is at risk,” he said. “Now [Democrats like Feinstein] were talking more about the risk that we face from organizations like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, people that are engaged more in military activities and violent extremist activities against the West and specifically against the United States. But we also want to highlight one other threat today: the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Hoekstra said the strategy and tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood is different from violent terrorists, but the goal is the same. “It was back in the 1990s that they outlined their strategy and how they were going to do exactly that: engage in Jihad, impose Sharia law, and basically establish a Caliphate or make the United States of America part of the global Caliphate,” he said. “But the difference here between them and Al Qaeda is they’re going to do it with a silent Jihad. Al Qaeda wants to do it with a violent Jihad.”

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney and National Review columnist Andy McCarthy added that because the threat of radical Islam first became apparent to wide swaths of Americans via violent terrorism from Al Qaeda and similar organizations, Americans tend to over focus on that while ignoring the subtle subversion of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Because this problem first came to us as a terrorism threat, which is one particular aspect of Islam which would we like to minimize,” McCarthy said. “We like to say this was a fringe ideology. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the dynamic of Islam of the Middle East.”

Hoekstra said the Muslim Brotherhood is “implementing” their plan “right under our noses in America.” He said they plan to use American laws, customs, values, the U.S. legal system, freedoms afforded by the Constitution like the freedom of speech, and more to “become a cancer on the United States and then destroy us.”

“That’s their strategy [in their own words],” he said. “That’s not an interpretation of it. That’s what they say they are going to do.”

Stephen Coughlin, an Islamic law expert who was formerly a top Pentagon adviser on these issues, said that America’s intelligence and military leaders need to understand what the Muslim Brotherhood is up to. “Here is the rule for intelligence: The enemy is the enemy,” he said. “You never take your eyes off the enemy, and every time you take your eyes off the enemy, you are not threat-focused. And when you are not threat-focused, you will be defeated as you are an allocating force, kinetic or non-kinetic, to activities that do or do not exist at the expense of those that do. It’s that simple. Everything that gets in the way of that is deception.”

Coughlin added that right now Muslim Brotherhood front groups are winning the “meta narrative” or larger cultural and normative war in the media and elsewhere. “Right now, the people who control the narrative is not us,” he said.

Other experts who presented during this panel include former FBI agent John Guandolo, Deborah Weiss an expert on Islam, and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim who is openly fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood.